There was something unusual about Apple's 2011 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Judging by the buzz before the event and the uproarious response, you'd be forgiven for assuming the company had released a new piece of hardware—perhaps a new iPhone. But it didn't. This year, WWDC was all about software: desktop software, mobile software and cloud services. These clumps of code, however, say more about the future of Apple than its recent hardware announcements. They say that Apple worships at the altar of apps, that the company is finally serious about the cloud and that it wasn't bluffing with its "Post-PC" posturing. Here's what you need to know about today's iOS 5, OS X Lion and iCloud news.

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iOS 5: Notifications, Cord-Cutting, Twitter and Newsstand

Notifications: The clumsy notification system in iOS has been a problem since the earliest days of iOS. It used to just be an occasional SMS popup interrupting a web browsing session. With the advent of 3rd-party apps—and later, push notifications—the problems were compounded. That intrusive blue popup because a constant annoyance, interrupting everything from games to FaceTime sessions. In response to years of grumbling, Apple is killing the popup entirely. In iOS 5, notifications—new texts, GameCenter notices, Twitter notifications, and more—briefly appear at the top of the screen, and are collected in a pull-down app drawer, alongside a few resident widgets such as weather and stocks. Apple's solution feels familiar for two reasons: It functions much in the same way as Android's notification drawer, and it's remarkably similar to some of the better jailbreak notification hacks. The new notification system is called Notification Center, and it extends to the iOS lock screen, too. When the device screen is awakened, users will see a list of notifications on the lock screen. Using the familiar slide-to-unlock gesture on any of the items will unlock the phone and open up the associated app.

Wireless Syncing and Updating: The most jarring part of the new iPhone or iPad experience comes the instant after it's turned on, when your brand new wireless device won't work until it's synced to a Mac or PC. iOS 5 makes device activation, updating and even iTunes syncing entirely wireless. As a bonus, to lighten the bandwidth load of downloading system updates that can be in the hundreds of megabytes, Apple is introducing so-called "Delta" updates. Instead of downloading and reinstalling the entire OS with every update, iOS devices will now be able to upgrade with smaller, incremental packages, like Mac OS or Windows.

The new emphasis on wireless syncing extends to media, too. iTunes can synced over Wi-Fi. This will encourage more frequent syncing, but will probably take a good deal longer than traditional syncing, and could be a serious battery drain.

Twitter Integration: Like virtually every other smartphone OS on the market, iOS will include some form of built-in Twitter support. From inside core iOS apps such the camera, browser and photo album, users will be able to compose and send Tweets much in the same way apps currently allow sharing via email.

Newsstand: Publishers and readers alike have been waiting for Apple to cordon off a separate part of the App Store for magazine and newspaper apps, and with iOS 5, they'll actually reside in their own app called Newsstand. Apps will also be able to download content in the background, so users won't have to wait for new issues to download.

iMessage: A rather vicious blow to Research in Motion, iMessage is the Apple equivalent to Blackberry's BBM messaging. It's free, instant, encrypted, and features delivery and read receipts for senders.

Browsing: Boring old mobile Safari has been made a bit less boring with the dual additions of tabbed browsing and a new feature called Reader, which strips away graphics and ads on content for a cleaner reading experience. It's an awful lot like the popular Instapaper app, down to the "Reading List" read-it-later functionality, which collects articles for later reading offline, and syncs them between devices.

Camera: A few subtle upgrades to the iPhone's camera app include the aforementioned Twitter sharing, automatic photo uploading (more on that in a bit), immediate access from the homescreen for faster shooting, pinch-to-zoom, basic editing tools (red eye, cropping) and, for the iPhone 4, shooting with the Volume Up button. (Apple memorably banned third party apps that included that last feature.)

Mail: The aging mail app gets a long-overdue update to include support for rich text, indentations, address drag-and-drop, flagging, an iBook-style dictionary and improved search.

Keyboard: Arguably the least Apple-like of today's announcements is the addition of a two-section split keyboard option, enabling easier two-thumb typing in portrait mode. (This isn't like Apple mainly in that it's an admission of fault.)

Game Center: The iOS gaming hub gets photo avatars, game recommendations and a few competitive features for matching your stats against friends.

Reminders: An evolution of the iOS Notes app, Reminders is a location-aware to-do list. You can trigger items to pop up at a certain time, or at a set location.

iOS 5 will be available to the public in the Fall.

OS X Lion: "Demoting the PC"

Launchpad: Even when this year's WWDC wasn't about mobile, it was about mobile. When Mac OS 10.7 Lion was unveiled in part last October, it was clear that Apple was planning to recast its desktop operating system in the mold of iOS. Most conspicuously, as we saw today, this means a fresh interface, with an iOS-style app launcher (think big icons and animated folders), as well as a strong push toward the Mac App Store. In fact, the only way to get this upgrade will be to download it from the Store.

Mission Control: A combination of existing Mac OS features Spaces and Expose, Mission Control is a dashboard for everything that's running on your computer, including active apps, suspended apps and fullscreen apps. It's accessed with a three-finger touchpad gesture, and controlled with a bevy of others.

Fullscreen Apps: The interface changes extend to individual apps as well. Developers will be given tools to enable fullscreen modes into apps. Multi-touch touchpad gestures let you switch between fullscreen apps.

App Resume: Another carryover from the mobile world, App Resume freezes apps in the state that you left them. So if you reopen the app or restart you computer, the app's contents are retained. This, combined with autosaving, essentially eliminates the need to save documents in progress. The near-constant saves are stored in an interface called Versions, which lets you navigate the history of a document in the same way you'd browse items in Apple's backup software, Time Machine.

Airdrop: A simple file locker for sharing files with other users. It works a lot like the online file locker Dropbox, except rather than storing the files in the cloud, Airdrop shares them directly via P2P.

Email: The OS X Mail app has been redesigned in the image of the iOS email client, with a fullscreen, multi-column view. Long threads are separated into modules (instead of mountains of multicolored, variously indented text), and the current client's search mechanism has been beefed up with real time suggestions.

OS X Lion will be available in July at $29.99.

iCloud: All Apple Everything

The Basics: Apple's paid email/documents/photo sharing service, MobileMe, was summarily executed at WWDC by none other than Steve Jobs. Jobs, a man who doesn't make jokes at his own expense, joked at his own expense: "You might ask: why should I believe them? They're the ones that brought me MobileMe." The only evidence of MobileMe that'll be left is the @me email domain, from which Apple will continue to assign new addresses.

This Execution was Followed by a Coronation: a new free service called iCloud is to pick up where MobileMe left off. An umbrella name for a variety of cloud and sync services, iCloud exists to do two things: to reduce the need for syncing devices to PC, and to make document, media and settings sharing between iOS devices and PCs as seamless as possible. Actually, there's a third thing iCloud does: It also exists to make Apple users completely dependent on Apple, which will now store huge amounts of their personal data.

Music: This was one of the few aspects of the iCloud service to leak (content licensing negotiations are often a source of early Apple rumors.) In practice, it's a small but significant part of the overall service. First, any songs purchased in iTunes can now be redownloaded from the store in case they're deleted from your computer or devices. More interestingly, for $25 per year, Apple will allow users to add songs of their own, ripped (or pirated) from outside sources, to their iCloud account. Rather than requiring users to upload their music to Apple's servers, iCloud will attempt to match these MP3s against the iTunes library, and add DRM-free copies of the songs to the cloud account.

Photos: iOS devices with cameras will get a feature called Photo Stream, which automatically uploads photos to Apple's servers and simultaneously syncs the photos to your other iOS devices, Macs and PCs. iOS devices will retain 1000 pictures at a time, and the online service will hold onto them for 30 days. Full archiving is reserved for desktops and laptops.

Apps: iOS apps can now be more easily redownloaded or shared between multiple iOS devices. (This has actually been part of iOS for some time now, but there was no central interface for seeing what you'd already downloaded.)

Documents and Backup: Apple will provide iCloud users with 5GB of free storage, which will be (more or less automatically) filled with music, smaller files such as documents from iWork, app settings and data, system settings and SMS/MMS records. Together this makes a very basic backup—almost exactly like the backups iTunes makes during iPhone/iPad syncing—that can be restored wirelessly. These backups will be updated daily.